On
the heels of his California trilogy comes American poet Joseph Massey’s fourth
poetry title, Illocality (Seattle
WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2015). His previous collection, To Keep Time (Richmond CA: Omnidawn,
2014) [see my review of such here], was the “third and final book grounded in
the landscape and weather of coastal Humboldt County, California, and contains
the last poems I wrote there before moving to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts
in the winter of 2013.” As the press release for this new title informs: “Joseph
Massey composed Illocality in his
first year in Western Massachusetts. Massey’s austere landscapes channel the
quiet shock, euphoria, and introspection that come with reorientation to place.”
Illocality is a sequence of exploratory
moments composed in short bursts, as Massey attempts to locate himself in the physical
and philosophical spaces that make up his new geography, although one that
seems devoid of human interaction.

The world is real

in its absence of a
world. (“TAKE PLACE”)

His
short, precise lines echo William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, but place
themselves in entirely different ways: the physical shapes of his immediate physical
environment. And Pioneer Valley (especially during the winter) is very different
than Humboldt County, California. As he writes in the poem “PARSE”: “This rift
valley // A volley of / seasonal beacons // Window / where mind // finds orbit
[.]” Where Williams and Creeley included the domestic and other other human
interactions in their precise explorations (that included geography and the
physical landscape), Massey’s poems allow for the suggestion of human presence
without any kind of direct interaction. Where are all the people in Pioneer
Valley?

ROUTE
31

Yellow centerline

split with roadkill.

First day of summer—I’ve
got my omen—

the clouds are hollow,
roving

above a parking lot.

Each strip-mall pennant
blurred.

So much metal

shoving sun

the sun shoves back.

Massey’s
invocations of the natural world are often in parallel, or even in conflict,
with the human world: “the sun shoves back.” His is an uneasy balance between
the two. Logics of the natural and human elements of the geography collide, and
become illogical, creating their own set of standards, logics and rules, all of
which he attempts to track, question and even disentangle. As he writes in the extended
sequence “TAKE PLACE”:

1. How did your first book change your
life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?

It
— Multiple Poses, Vancouver: Tsunami
Editions, 1997 (though not actually emerged until spring ’98; long out of
print) — mostly or merely convinced me I wasn’t a complete lame-ass at this
poetry stuff. That book represents ten years of destroying previous work,
generating anew, rethinking refeeling regrowing toward a different,
Language-based poetics. Which was preceded by fifteen years of being a very
prolific, substantively meagre Lyric poet with a poor ear and a snide sense of
humour.

Now
the ear is cacophonous and the humour’s deliberately vile!

Recent work — Carbonated Bippies!,
Vancouver: Nomados Literary Publishers, 2012 (also out of print, ridiculously
enough) — is partly my attempt to recapitulate the disavowed Lyric, but by
making of it an icky formalism.

2. How did you come to poetry first, as
opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I
came to poetry simultaneously with making 8mm silent movies and writing horror
fiction.

I
was emotionally drawn to it without knowing why.

There’s
still something ineffable about poetry to me. It can be mischievous,
mysterious, flexible, anarchic. Any day I wholly
apprehend what it does or upon it losing those qualities will be the day I
likely stop writing poems.

That
impulse to make movies is long gone, without regret. Same for the horror
stories, although it’s very fair to say that most of my poems are in essence that, “transcribed” into
broken-plot, poetic takes.

“Brains!”
ejaculates zombie capitalism. “The political economy did this to me” cries the
dying patient.

3. How long does it take to start any
particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it
a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or
does your work come out of copious notes?

“Copious
notes” is a phrase that rings a big gong. My basic unit of composition is the
line. Which can be a single word. I’m always scribbling quickly to no
particular order. (This fully unleashes the hounds of inspiration and evades the
potentates of censorship.) Adding the lines to a permanent stack of pages.
Quick lines, slow poems.

4. Where does a poem usually begin for
you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger
project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

Rarely
do I know that I’m working on a book. It’s more like one old poem-foot before
the next old poem-foot, soldier, selah. The material for the poems comes from
that motherlode of single lines I accumulate from daily writing. I get (in
pukka) a conceptual arc or (in common yammering) a lightbulb for something that
might make an interesting or exciting text, then start collating lines from the
wad that speak to and against it. Lines get rewritten, new lines pop up, lines
get shifted around, some of what I think are my better lines get cut, then Un
Viola!, poem.

I
don’t write a poem as much as edit one into being.

5. Are public readings part of or
counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing
readings?

I do enjoy giving readings, although they
make me deeply nervous. Which I figure should be the case, part of the human
comedy.

More
to the point is public readings as part of our social process. No actual public without people in a room, perpetrating
live text. This may be heresy, but I consider poetry readings to be television.
Aaaiiiii! Well, they’re my
television, anyway (I live without standard toys and furniture). I prefer
noisier readings, though there’s a lot to be said for the quiet of responsive
listening. Poetry shouldn’t resemble a religious service. We need no Church of
Poetry idolatry.

Now
I’ll contradict myself by saying I also believe that Bill Hicks quip: “Watching
TV is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.”

6. Do you have any theoretical concerns
behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your
work? What do you even think the current questions are?

No
theoretical concerns whatsoever. I’m not that bright when it comes to theory
and I’m in thrall to my kitbag of horrid obsessions (power, war, money, sex,
pain, death) and I’m devoted to creating a high-octane reading experience for
people and I’m not interested in hacking out cultural recipe cards. I try to
complicate answers rather than solve any questions. I have a questing
sensibility and I want that doing whatever throughout a poem. “Botches? We
don’t feed no stinking ….”

7. What do you see the current role of
the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think
the role of the writer should be?

Ideally,
the writer should be a bisexual hermaphrodite. A witness, a testifier, a
historian, a saboteur, an agent devoted to destroying the normative. A
living-room comic and a bedroom doctor.

8. Do you find the process of working
with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both.
It’s humbling though necessary to realize that it’s fatuous, risky, arrogant,
and self-sabotaging to consider your own sentience an infallible god; that you
need help; that you need an outside perspective; that you yourself can’t be that outsider. Best to seek
assistance.

9. What is the best piece of advice
you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

This
was something I learned from years of being his friend, briefly in Toronto and
then longer in Vancouver (he’s lived predominantly in New York since 1992).
What I believe he means is that one should be brave and take chances in text
and not homogenize them into safe or simple objects with a forced or false
single point of view. Make them richer,
make them stranger.

10. What kind of writing routine do you
tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I
wake at dawn (or earlier, if lucky or unfortunate). Harvest the nightmares. Put
the coffee on. Drink it (two cups, max). Maintain the dream-state of a silent
apartment. Read other people’s poetry for an hour. Write poetry for another
hour. Then Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” Then into the quotidian roar.

Needles
to say, when trying to get a poem made, batches of long hours have to happen.
Scheduled whenever practical.

11. When your writing gets stalled,
where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I
let it get stalled. There’s no virtue in rushing or forcing anything. I’ve
learned that over a goodly spell of
bitter years! You just wreck the text if you try.

12. What fragrance reminds you of home?

Notwithstanding
that my sense of home is largely prosthetic …My mother’s cigarette smoke.

13. David W. McFadden once said that
books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,
whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music.

14. What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Political
material.

15. What would you like to do that you
haven’t yet done?

Live
in a democracy (as opposed to In Capitalism).

16. If you could pick any other
occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you
would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

No
idea.

Maybe
I would have run away with a circus. The classical “geek” job might have suited
me best.

Or
maybe that would have been unnecessary. Could be that the circus has always
already surrounded us and is now most certainly the Panopticon.

17. What made you write, as opposed to
doing something else?

We
need language. We are language. Why
not work with the primal stuff? And, on a practical level, it’s the most
flexible, portable, and materially cheap art form.

18. What was the last great book you
read? What was the last great film?

I
resist completely even the notion of Great Books. I find that thinking in those
terms at all is a shortcut to ending up with sexist, classist, and racist Top
Tens, as well as canonical reifications.

I
prefer to consider and revisit the “merely interesting”!

I
read a fair bit and my tastes are pretty catholic. I’ll restrict my picks to
recent Canadian poetry in the more Language-y or conceptual parts of the
spectrum. (Which will exclude a lot.)

Speaking
of anarchy, NDN word-warrior Annharte’s Indigena Awry is a critically important and gloriously troublesome feast. Often
woundingly funny and very moving. (See also her more recent book of essays, AKA Inendagosekwe.)

Roy Miki’s Mannequin Rising might be his
most affable book yet, as well as his most difficult. Go figure. Most
dystopian, and funniest.

Cecily Nicholson’s Triage deploys a
stunningly elliptical, pulverized syntax to theatricalize, internalize, and
confront the crises in and of capitalism. Very impressive! It’s a humane
muttering in service of a permanent rebellion, and demands slow reading.

Roewan Crowe’s Quivering Land is a
significant, liberatory queering of the Western. A protean text (prose? poetry?
both? say what?) complicated by bleakness and lavishness. Crowe is also a
visual artist, and this book has to be one of the more gorgeous objects in
contemporary trade book production. Includes reproductions of hand-cut paper
images by Paul Robles.

Jeff Derksen’s The Vestiges is fabulously
necessary. It’s a sober and often witheringly witty examination of the
Permanent Neoliberal Crisis we’re all living in. Long poems; the parenthetical
shifted into the relative city square of things; lots of hot, centripetal
action.

Catriona
Strang’s first solo book in about twenty years (she being more inclined to
collaborate with the late Nancy Shaw) is Corked,
and it is a gorgeous riot. Outraged female life and labour in neo(bruta)liberal
Vanhattan BC HarperLand. Poetically and sonically exact; satirically geologic.
Ponk rawk, wiped memory, a sensible sadness. “Dear Strang, You are so not yoga [cackle].”

Trish
Salah’s work is a big new love for me. Her Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1 is a thrilling swirl of poetic field work on gender
construction from an exquisitely smart trans perspective. Language spirals
through itself thickly, and there’s a sardonic, camp humour happening, too. “I
didn’t mean to become an I.” “I am counting the kinds of impossible / No one
ever is”.

With
Janey’s Arcadia, Rachel Zolf has
gifted us with an acidic and coruscating calling out of the permanent
colonialism and devolved racism against Kanata’s indigenous peoples. It is a
beautiful (and occasionally blackly funny) fury. I hope it helps destroy Canada
into a just formation.

The
densely rippled sonics happening throughout Natalie Simpson’s Thrum are, not simply, thrilling!
“Poetics of hop and pop.” A book of abundance.

Over
thirty years and several books, Colin Browne has been working up his slantwise,
scholarly, and underhandedly irreverent take on the Lyric tradition to an
increasing sophistication and oddness. Thus: The Properties.

o w n is a unique
book. Three authors — a rawlings, Heather Hermant, and Chris Turnbull — are
yoked together by their ecological concerns. Styles here are wide-ranging,
though — rawlings contributes a play that would be impossible to mount, while
Hermant and Turnbull have image-text pieces coming from very different
sentiences and poetics. Fascinating!

Nikki Reimer’s Downverse is such a dark
read, O god! She’s fond of procedural sculpting toward rich, overdetermined
textures. Subject matter is often harrowing — economic and political violence
and injustice. There are a lot of trolls in this book. Hideous socialscapes of
Vancouver and Calgary. Cultural horrors. Anthracite wit. So much
“inappropriate” fun, yum!

With
Un/inhabited, Jordan Abel has
rejigged a text dump of ninety-one Westerns — using techniques of erasure,
cartography, and extraction — into a righteous reverse engineering that enables
us to look accurately at Canada as a colonialist entity. As much a piece of
visual art as poetry, this book is baffling, moving, and bleakly funny in all
the good ways.

Mercedes
Eng’s Mercenary English and Roger
Farr’s MEANS offer, respectively,
properly enraged and antically disinhibiting takes on the dark matter of some
political “social”s (torture paradigms, money loops) too many of us are trapped
in.

Speaking
of making more with less, a production entity yclept Intercopy has perpetrated
a worthy insanity by vastly reducing Georges Bataille’s novel Saccades into a sparse poem obsessed with liquids. Yow!, it’s funny and serious.

A
chapbook-length manuscript of poems for Lary Bremner’s obvious epiphanies press. These’ll be more intimate in tone and address than what I most often do
(which is a large motivation for writing them). Although I doubt I can ever
truly duck the hideous Public Service Announcement UnVoice that I tend to use,
these are all dedicated to actual people and have a homier slant to them.